As is known, all ships today, regardless of their type of navigation, must have two magnetic compasses, one referred to as the master compass (housed in the binnacle) and another secondary compass.
Said master compass must be compensated with magnets with a certain measurement at least once a year, the subsequent deviation chart being prepared. The “compass bearing”, to which the corresponding deviation will be applied to obtain the “magnetic bearing”, is obtained from this compass, the “magnetic bearing” being affected by the terrestrial magnetic declination which, once increased or decreased, will provide the “true bearing”.
The use of the gyrocompass is also well known in its application to sea navigation, specifically for obtaining the “true bearing” which has been gradually developed through the “rotation bearing” by means of a small correction by the latitude and speed of the ship, its mainly professional usefulness being due to its application to the automatic pilot.
On the other hand, the appearance of satellite systems in ships was initially used exclusively in the positioning, with a temporal offset of minutes in relation to time. Today, since it has an almost comprehensive synchronism of time, with respect to the positioning, other applications have been developed, obtaining signals from said receivers, such as “course over ground”, which correspond with the angle between the geographic meridian and the line joining the points of the center of gravity of the ship on the sea bed, which is known as “course over ground”.
It is therefore clear that within the satellite positioning and navigation techniques enormous developments have been made since they appeared in the application at hand. Experiments are currently being conducted with satellite compasses which offer almost absolute precision, the development of which, together with that of other systems, will make said satellite receivers an even more indispensable instrument than what they already are today, it being foreseen that in the mid-term, said equipment will replace the gyroscopic compass, but never the magnetic compass due to the autonomy of the latter.
It is therefore necessary to create an autonomous and precise navigation system which does not depend on external systems or equipment for their operation but which, however, can benefit from them, such that the data offered by the previously mentioned positioning systems in their application to navigation and more specifically to sea navigation, is limited only to one input, as is currently offered by gyrocompass and which corresponds to the “true bearing” (referred to as the “rotation bearing” or “satellite bearing”), this being the main objective of the present invention.
However, the applicant is unaware of the existence of any integral magnetic compass for obtaining deviations in real time which has technical, structural and configuration features similar to those herein proposed.